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Archive for the ‘NGA’ Category

As mentioned in our year-end wrap-up, a great number of events that shaped technology in 2017 were natural disasters. Scientists and experts predict that we will see more of these natural events and will continue R&D efforts to prepare for them.

Smart city technology will become more important as geospatial professionals seek to find better ways to predict, analyze and prepare communities for the onslaught of weather events. Actual Smart Cities are being built in some parts of the world. And to make those smart cities and countries, in some cases, viable, we will grow greater confidence in artificial intelligence, vehicle technology, Cloud, Internet of Things (IoT), drones, high resolution satellites and small satellites, augmented, virtual and mixed realities and data and sensors.

These technologies have become or will become a part of the fabric of geospatial interaction as the demand for them increases.

At GEOINT 2017 held this year in San Antonio, TX, Robert Cardillo, director, National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, spoke about the role of GEOINT and how it will drive the next generation of intelligence in his keynote address, “Riding the Wave.”

Robert Cardillo, the director of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, speaks to the GEOINT 2017 symposium June 5. Credit: USGIF

The recent presidential election in the U.S. has created so much uncertainty that it is hard to know what the future of any industry will be. For the first time, I feel there is no point in making predictions for the New Year for the geospatial industry, unless one is an insider with special knowledge of the winds of change.

Hexagon Safety & Infrastructure acquired GISquadrat GmbH of Vienna, Austria. The acquisition is aimed at enhancing Hexagon’s geospatial, cloud and mobile solutions for governments and utility providers in Europe as well as bringing in more than 300 customers and thousands of users into the Hexagon fold.

About two weeks ago, Esri launched a collection of web maps that display NOAA forecast streamflow data for the continental U.S. NOAA’s recently released National Water Model. Data from the Model combined with the National Hydrography Dataset and fed by NOAA’s National Weather Service data, forecasts the flow of water along the 2.7 million stream segments in the continental U.S. in ArcGIS Online.